Ace the Product Management Interview prep — Step by Step guide
After preparing for more than 6 months and appearing in more than 40+ interviews with companies such as Microsoft, PhonePe, Razorpay, Walmart, etc, I have been able to identify the key resources, milestones, and frameworks of my Product Management interview prep, which I have tried sharing via this post.
My preparation process has been split down into four basic steps:
Step 1: Get Familiar with Product Management:
To obtain a fundamental understanding of product management, I started by reading the following resources:
- Books: Decode and Conquer: Answers to Product Management Interviews
- Books: Cracking The Pm Interview: How To Land A Product Manager Job In Technology
- Online Resources for PM introduction & cases — https://stellarpeers.com/learn/
Step 2: Prepare your Resume:
This is the most crucial step, which I only realized later. You will be contacted for an interview only when your resume gets shortlisted. Few tips that worked for me later on:
- Get your CV examined by alums of your MBA program or any friends or connections who work for the companies you’re looking to apply for
- Modify your resume based on Job descriptions posted by the companies
- Try to follow a STAR approach — situation, task, action, and result, while writing the content in your resume
- Mention any product-related work you completed in past jobs or as a side project in college.
- Highlight and bold the relevant terms related to product management in your CV/Resume
Step 3: Achieve expertise in Product Frameworks:
Resources you can use for Case prep:
- PMExercises: https://www.productmanagementexercises.com/
- Exponent: https://www.tryexponent.com/
The product management preparations involve questions being asked upon a certain set of frameworks mentioned below (High to Low Priority):
- Product Design
- Product Improvement
- Root Cause Analysis
- Product Market Entry Strategy
- Go-To-Market Strategy
- Product Metrics
So what are these frameworks?
These are only a few strategies for dealing with Product cases and interview questions. These frameworks help you think and answer problems in a more organized way. According to my experience, while these frameworks provide a systematic approach, putting too much focus on them can lead to a loss of any unique ideas that could serve as a distinction during the interview.
I have mentioned a summarized version of these frameworks below:
Product Design:
About: The interviewer will ask “How will you design a Product X ?” or “Mention your favorite product & explain”
Framework:
- Ask Preliminary questions & tell your overall approach to the interviewer
- Create customer segments
- Prioritize a segment and identify the pain points
- Identify the solutions and prioritize one
- Mention the key metrics you will track and any risks associated
Product Improvement:
About: The interviewer will ask “How will you improve Product X ?”
Framework:
- Ask Preliminary questions & understand the goal behind the improvement
- Identify the users (If the user-provided ignore this step)
- Find pain points & Prioritize pain points
- Build solutions (suggest one moon-shot) & Prioritize solutions
- Metrics
- Tradeoff
Root Cause Analysis:
About: The interviewer will ask “The X number of users has reduced by Y%, find the reason?”
Framework:
- Ask Preliminary questions & understand the problem
- Evaluate External factors: Competitions, Any promotion, price, product change, Any bad/good press they have got, Compliments or substitutes, etc
- Evaluate Internal factors — Actual product itself: App update issue, User journey change, UI/UX change, etc
- Mention the exact reason & summarize
- Suggest three recommendations
- Conclude
Product Market Entry:
About: The interviewer will ask “Should company X venture into industry Y?”
Framework:
- Ask for the objective: Profit or Market share
- Evaluate the market size, market share, industry, and competitors
- Run Porter’s 5 forces analysis — Buyer, Supplier, Barriers to entry, Competition, Threats of substitutes
- Evaluate financial & operational viability
- Take a decision — Enter or Not Enter
Go-To-Market Strategy:
About: The interviewer will ask “How can company X launch product Y in the market?”
Framework:
- Ask for the main goal around the product
- Evaluate STP — Segmentation, Targeting & Positioning
- Execute a 4Ps analysis: Product, Price, Place, Promotion
- Evaluate any challenges with the approach
Product Metrics:
About: The interviewer will ask “What ket metrics shall Company Y track for Product X?”
Framework:
- Identify the goal, and what are we looking to track — Are we creating new metrics or are we changing any metrics
- Break the whole app into a User Journey:
- Awareness of app
- Acquisition of the users
- Activation by the users
- Retention
- Engagement
- Monetization
- Referral
- Happiness
- Always decide on the north star or focus metric first (The key metric you will use to measure your goal) followed by the level 1 & level 2 metrics
Step 4: Prepare for Case presentation submissions:
Many organizations ask for case submissions. Case submissions mean that companies will give an open-ended problem based on the frameworks mentioned above. The interviewer will be expected to prepare a case presentation with wireframes on how he/she will solve the problem.
You can get more details on the following article written by me: Neo Banks — Product case study